Coping Strategies
by Astralis
Summary: There's more than one way to cope. Saracentric, some NS at end. Spoilerish for 'Bloodlines'.


**COPING STRATEGIES**  
  
**DISCLAIMER:** Unfortunately enough, they aren't mine. I may have delusions sometimes, but reality always comes back to haunt me in the end. So, I'm just playing. Not very nicely perhaps, but the fact remains.  
  
**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** Because nothing I write lately works out like I want it to, I wrote this as a diversion. It's N/S, of course, and spoilerish for Bloodlines.  
  
All constructive criticism greatly appreciated. If you think Sara's out of character, tell me where and why. She's hard to write.  
  
Read, and enjoy.

* * *

Once upon a time, her coping strategy was simple.  
  
Get up, order takeout, go to work, come home, read textbooks, go to bed, try to sleep.  
  
That lasted for so long - it had been her strategy, in various forms, since her college days - that it had come almost to define who she was. 'Sara Sidle, workaholic.' All the comments and advice, sometimes helpful and well-meaning, sometimes not, that she'd had over the years showed her what people thought.   
  
"Get a life, Sara."   
  
"You need to get out more."  
  
"If you don't have a diversion, you'll burn out."  
  
"Sara, dear, do you have any friends?"  
  
That was how people saw her. Very few people tried to get behind the facade to the real Sara, and even less succeeded.  
  
Grissom, once. When she'd been a bright student in her senior year at Harvard, inescapably sucked in by his visiting lecture on the glories of forensic science and had waited behind after the other students had gone to talk to him, her words almost falling over each other in her eagerness to know more, to talk to someone who was so passionate about what they did.  
  
Sometime, she couldn't pinpoint when, in her past, he'd slipped back out through the cracks in her mask and now he stood looking at her from the outside, not even trying to get in. Not even seeming to realise that the Sara he'd known as a student was different from the one he knew as a colleague.  
  
Perhaps if she'd been some exciting type of cockroach, he would have noticed the changes.  
  
Nick had tried, flirting with her when she'd first arrived in the lab, but back then that had been what Nick did: flirt with anything and everything that wore a skirt. Or, in Sara's case, had the right genetic structure to wear a skirt in public without encountering derisive stares from strangers. And she wasn't stupid; she knew his type, or thought she did.   
  
She stored the fact that he preferred lace to leather in some carefully organised section of her brain in case she ever needed it again and moved on.  
  
Greg would have liked to really know her; so would Catherine, but whether that was genuine interest or just curiousity was unclear, and anyway, it was enough to make her distrust Catherine's motives. Oh, sometimes she wished she had a female friend and Catherine was the only woman she saw on a regular basis, but mistrusting people stopped you from getting hurt in the long run.  
  
Hank was an aberration, her only real serious boyfriend since college. She'd let him in, slowly, and looking back now she had no idea why. Desperation, perhaps. He'd seemed nice enough, a little bland maybe but comfortable, steady - until she found out that she wasn't the only woman who thought so. Maybe the fact she knew perfectly well she could never love him had softened the blow just a tiny bit but it couldn't disguise the fact that he'd used her, cheated on her, and used her to cheat on someone who really _did _love him.   
  
And he hadn't cared when she'd found out. That was what had hurt the most, really, that he didn't _care_ she knew he was a cheater, didn't _care_ he was losing her.   
  
Talk about a blow to the self esteem.  
  
That was when her coping strategy began to change.  
  
It was just a drink here and there at first. Two drinks with Catherine after she found out about Hank, because it was just the only thing in the world she could think of to do. Too many to count after the lab explosion and her disastrous attempt at asking Grissom out. The significant amount of vodka she'd drunk was more than enough to wipe Grissom and her own stupidity from her mind for a few gloriously blank hours at least. Three drinks after Lockwood died - one for his memory, sitting there alone in her apartment wondering why it was the people who mattered who died - and then another two to take her mind off that thought.  
  
The major events of more than a year could be marked by what she'd had to drink. If she couldn't remember what she'd had, then it had been really bad and the alcohol had done its job. She drank beer if it had just been a reasonably bad day, moving onto the spirits when things got really bad. Probably at least ten for Susannah Kirkwood, lying dead in her driveway, for Susannah's parents and for the absolute hell Susannah had gone through before she died. First beer, then vodka and coke, all the while thanking what deities she could struggle up a belief in for the fact that she had the next day off, and spending that day trying to convince herself that the headache and nausea were her punishment for not getting the guys who'd messed up a young girl's life.  
  
Five when she'd asked Grissom that _stupid_ question about the promotion, all the while hoping that he'd say something, anything, to make her believe that everything she'd thought had happened between them hadn't been just her imagination.   
  
More than she knew after the Ashley Curtis fiasco, all the while hating herself for being so thick, so gullible, for jumping to Ashley's side the second she heard the word 'rape'.  
  
So many after she'd heard Grissom say that 'he couldn't' risk himself, his career, whatever, on her, that work the next day had been hell. Another punishment, and so was Catherine's sympathy for the stomach bug she thought Sara had.   
  
Enough to send the world into oblivion after she'd been stopped, just the tiniest bit over the BAC limit, and, of all the humiliating things to happen, have had Grissom called in. Enough that the next night she called in sick for perhaps the third time since she'd been in Las Vegas and had left the landline off the hook and her mobile and pager off all night while she just lay there, trying to rationalise with herself that finishing off her bottle of vodka would only make things worse, even if it knocked her out for now.  
  
Really, hating yourself wasn't a very good coping strategy, but she got up (almost) everyday and she went to work and she functioned, more or less. As far as everyone else was concerned she was just the same old Sara, except that now she wasn't letting her guard down, not even for a second. Not Brass, not Nick - not anyone. She wouldn't risk it.  
  
Now she had another coping strategy.  
  
There was so much more to life when you came home, not to textbooks or a police scanner, or to assorted bottles of alcohol, but to a person who noticed when your smile wasn't quite right, or the tone of your voice wasn't as it should be. It was a new experience for her to sit there, eating spaghetti bolognaise - in front of the television, no less - and just talk, and even when the cravings for alcohol got unbearable to know that she wouldn't be allowed to give in.  
  
Her coping strategy now meant Nick. It meant not hiding her head in the sand, even when she wanted to more than anything. It meant dealing with the demons that haunted her days and tormented her nights, and actually getting some professional help, which hurt like hell and she'd been furious when he'd even suggested it - but it had exorcised the voices from her head on all but the worst of days.   
  
It meant being with someone else through _their_ nightmares and realising that she wasn't the only one who couldn't let go of the past. It meant helping him to move on and holding him when he was miserable, knowing that he'd do the same thing for her.  
  
It meant not crawling into a cold bed and lying there, half wanting, half dreading, the prospect of sleep, or collapsing into bed with a bowl on the floor in case she threw up all the alcohol she'd had. It meant going to bed with someone who'd hold you in their sleep.  
  
She'd been to hell and back in her life, and so had Nick, and it had taken each of them so long to stop dancing and consciously work through their issues that sometimes those years seemed like wasted years. Once she'd mentioned it to Nick, lying in bed with him, and he'd said that maybe they weren't wasted, because they made these years so much better.  
  
Sara knew about coping, but she hadn't known about living until Nick had crept into her heart through the back door. It wasn't until then that she even knew there was a difference.

THE END


End file.
